360 degree videos watching with a VR headset can be a fantastic experience, but only if the image is sharp enough. The European Union wants to help out. The EU funding programme "Horizon 2020 is funding a group of video companies and film festivals, including Spin Digital, Sunny Side of the Doc, Tampere Film Festival, Marche Du Film and Sheffield Doc/Fest, to develop new video compression technology. This measure aims to improve the quality of 360-degree videos.
The project is called "DDD60" and Spin Digital is responsible for the technical development. But why are 360-degree videos sometimes so blurred? It's because of the compression, because 360-degree videos require a comparatively large amount of data, which then has to be compressed so that the stream can be played back without problems. "DDD60" is therefore intended to ensure that less data has to be transmitted when streaming 360-degree content, while at the same time optimising the visual quality.
According to Mauricio Álvarez-Mesa, the CEO of Spin DigitalThe video codec will be worked on throughout 2017 and hopefully shared with the film and TV industry and other partners in 2018. High-quality VR video will be offered in 4K, 8K and even 12K resolutions. Currently, two techniques are being considered to improve the quality of VR videos while reducing the data size.
Source: UploadVR
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